The Builders of the Land of Luxury
by Aisha Gawad
Dubai has become the poster child for the luxurious, Western-style hotels and palm tree-shaped islands that are synonymous with the rapid economic expansion of the Arab Gulf and the United Arab Emirates in particular. Dubai, the most well-known member of the confederation of states that make up the U.A.E, differs from its similarly oil rich neighbors like Saudi Arabia because it is seen as a beacon of extravagance in the Middle East rather than an enforcer of religious intolerance and oppression. But behind its glossy image, Dubai is also the home of a massive underworld of migrant workers, the work force behind all the glamour. These workers have been shamelessly abused for years, but Arab governments have only recently been held accountable for their mistreatment of foreign labor.
Although the same sort of abuse occurs in Saudi Arabia, where four Indonesian domestic workers were recently killed by the family they worked for, it seems more striking in places like Dubai and the rest of the U.A.E, that cater to Western ideas of tolerance. The U.A.E basically sprang up from the desert in the 1950s with the discovery of oil. Workers, largely from South Asia, migrated in droves, lured by the promise of better jobs created by the sudden burst of development. They are the men who build the skyscrapers and the women who clean the hotels. But they do not share in any of the perks of overwhelming economic success.
Most of the workers are poor natives of countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh with families back home to support. They are often so desperate that they pay illegal recruitment agents for visas and flights to the U.A.E, sometimes shelling out a couple thousand dollars before they even get there.
Once there, the migrants face their new employers, who often confiscate their passports to keep them from quitting. Already trapped into the job, foreign workers are paid measly wages, hardly enough to cover the debts they incurred to pay for illegal visas. Employers commonly withhold wages altogether for months at a time, essentially creating a slave labor force. While in theory, U.A.E. labor law protects against many of these abuses, it has been poorly enforced for many years. The workers are also prohibited from forming trade unions, according to a March 2006 report by Human Rights Watch.
These abuses went unchecked and virtually un-discussed in the Arab world for long enough to create a vast embittered and isolated segment of Gulf society. Now, however, the issue is garnering more attention largely because their numbers have grown to the point where denial is no longer an option. No country on earth is as dependant on foreign labor as the United Arab Emirates; 85 percent of the population and 99 percent of the private work force are migrant workers. And about two-thirds of the 4.5 million foreigners in the country are South Asians. The Arab elite is now entirely outnumbered and, facing the threat of mass riots and strikes as well as increased international and human rights scrutiny, they were forced to make some adjustments.
Recently, regulators from the Emirates' labor ministry have enforced new afternoon sun breaks, which are especially essential to the health of construction workers in the Gulf's sweltering heat. Emergency rooms are often teaming with construction workers suffering from heat exhaustion in the summer months. The labor ministry also instituted improved living conditions and health benefits, and punished companies that withheld workers' pay. The process has been slow so far, but the government has vowed to hire more inspectors to monitor working conditions.
While this progress is encouraging, it in no way means the international community should back off. In fact, the U.A.E. should be pressured even more to continue the reforms and make a serious effort to work with South Asian countries to police the still rampant problem of illegal recruitment. The government also needs to allow the workers to unionize. The fact that the foreign workers exist in such large numbers means that their unions could be very effective in collective bargaining and ensuring that businesses follow labor law. It is also means that they could be very powerful, but that's the price the U.A.E. must pay for its rapid economic boom and the work force behind it. The land of luxury in the East needs to come to terms with how it got that way.
